


sometimes the blues.

by outpastthemoat



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-10
Updated: 2014-03-10
Packaged: 2018-01-15 07:03:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,655
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1295845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/outpastthemoat/pseuds/outpastthemoat





	sometimes the blues.

This is what Dean knows about himself: He is no braver than he has to be.  He looks at Castiel sometimes and thinks, If only I were braver.  If only. If he had some courage, more than he has ever possessed, he could open his mouth and say something, sometime.  If he could be braver, he thinks he could carefully extract his heart and lay it all out there in the open, his heart ready and waiting and pinned to his sleeve for everyone to see.  He could lay it all out on the line.  

He thinks if he were a braver man, he wouldn’t be where he is.  

Tonight he is lying on his bed.  He’s lying on his bed with headphones covering his head and the worst music he has ever heard blasting in his ears.  He feels like he’s dying.  He thinks he is probably dying.  He is listening to a song and crying himself sick and he doesn’t even know why.  It’s been happening more and more lately, and every time it’s the most awful, terrible thing that’s ever happened to him.

He doesn’t consider himself a coward, but he has always been able to do just as much as he has to do and nothing more.  He can’t go the distance.  He’s come to terms with the fact that there are things he’ll never be able to say.  Things he’ll never be able to do.  He’s not all right with it, he’s not okay with the thought of standing on the sidelines, watching the world spin past, but what can you do: he’ll never take that final step.  

He did not set out to fall in love, but it isn’t until after it’s already happened that he finally realizes that it’s too late.  He’s a fucking sap. He’s in love.  He’s fucking in love, and it’s just as terrible as he’s always been lead to believe.  He’ll get no peace from now on.  Everything is terrible.  Everything in the wide world is Castiel’s hands or the tilt of his chin as he glances over his shoulder or his hair falling into his eyes; yeah, it’s all Castiel and it’s all awful, terrible; exactly the kind of thing that Dean sings along to in those awful, terrible songs.  

He’s in love, and he knows it, and it’s the most awful, terrible thing that’s ever happened to him.  

 —

It feels like a secret, like a diagnosis of some terminal illness; you’d think it’d be written all over his face, but it isn’t.  You’d think other people would be able to look at him and  _see_ , to take one glance at him and know right away that he goes home and locks himself in his bedroom and listens to Whitney Houston singing  _And I will always love you_ on repeat for hours, know that he writes song lyrics on the edges of papers, scrawls them on the backs of gas receipts and the edges of menus, that a few weeks ago he found a pad of lined yellow paper and started writing, filling up the lines with those terrible, awful songs he can’t quit listening to, that he writes _I wish you joy and happiness, but above all this, I wish you love_  over and over, that when his head hits the pillow at night he is still hearing _I will always love you, I will_ , you’d think everyone in the universe would know that he is still mouthing along to the words as he falls asleep.  You’d think anyone could see what’s inside him, any random stranger off the street.  You’d think someone would send him a sympathy card. 

He spends a lot of time alone, trying to recover.

He listens to more terrible music.  He listens to music that he’d never listen to, if he wasn’t dying a little inside.  He listens to music like it’s a secret, like it will revel some wisdom, teach him a cure somehow.  He listens to the worst songs he’s ever heard and all that happens is that those awful, terrible songs hit him right where it hurts, in the very center of his chest, and then he has to walk around later knowing that he’s one of _those people_ _,_ the kind of person who listens to awful love songs.  The kind of person that understands those kinds of songs.  The kind of person.

The kind of person who is in love.

He has spend his life living on the fringes of society, at the edge of the wilderness.  He has lived for so long as an outcast, but now he feels at last like he is one of a multitude, a member of a secret society.  He looks at men as he walks past, and sometimes he nods at them, because he fits in, now.  He is just the same as every other man who has ever fallen in love.  

—

He listens to more terrible music.  He stays up until two a.m. one night listening to radio shows and falls asleep with Donna Lewis breathily singing  _I Love you, always, forever_  in his ear.  He thinks this is a terrible place to be in, when the only songs that ever give his heart a bit of relief are all the wrong ones.  He sings in the shower,  _Well, all night, all night, w_ _ell, it’s time to go home and I ain’t even done with the night_.  Sometimes he listens to the blues.  He goes through boxes of vinyl and pulls out the blues and listens through the records, one by one.  He builds playlists on his laptop and never names them, just leaves them as  _untitled1 untitled 2_ , until he hears Christopher Cross singing  _S_ _wept away, away, seeing my tomorrows in your eyes_  and suddenly feels an overpowering need to go back and name all those playlists  _Cas: songs for Cas to listen to, songs about-, he’d like this one._  He makes a playlist and puts some Journey on it and titles it _for him._

He takes his cellphone and selects  _new message_ and types song lyrics into the text box and sends them to Cas, who is out there, somewhere; Cas, who never responds. He types out every line of Air Supply, from _Lost in Love_  to  _My Best Friend_.  He thinks about Cas opening up each message and frowning over them, Cas deciding that each one is just another of Dean’s stupid jokes, Cas spending nights in shitty hotel rooms and deleting old messages off his phone.  He thinks Cas might be in love.  Cas sends him pictures taken on his phone, of flowers that he’s picked and dried and pressed between pages of his journal. Cas had stopped him, not so long ago, from changing the radio station as The Righteous Brothers sang  _Unchained Melody._  

"I like this one," he had said, and they sat in the car, waiting until the song was finished, and Dean had watched him close his eyes and smile slightly and he had thought,  _I love you. I love you. I love you._

_—_

He takes the Impala and drives for weeks.  He drives for hundreds of miles, just to listen to the radio, just to bare his heart a little while singing  _Oh baby, ooooh I get chills when I’m with you_.  He stops at a red light and he catches a glimpse into the car next to his and there’s a woman with her hands clenched tight on the steering wheel and tears running down her face and she looks so exactly the way he feels inside that he wants to punch something, so when the light turns green he floors the gas and shoots out ahead of her, but he looks back in the rearview mirror and watches her wipe the tears off her face with the cuff of her sleeve and it makes him angry, furious. 

He stops on the side of the road, seven hundred miles from the bunker, and goes to turn off the engine but he finds he can’t unlock his seatbelt or open the door, because someone is singing _Wherever you go, whatever you do, I will be right here waiting for you_  and he has to sit there for a while, thinking it over.  Yes, he thinks.  That’s it.  That’s it exactly, and he feels once again the need to drive very fast, very far.  To run away.  He doesn’t think of himself as a coward, but he can’t make himself stop running.  He doesn’t think of himself as sentimental, but when he sees old men resting their hands on their wives’ elbows, he feels tears prickling in the corners of his eyes.  He wonders if that’s what being in love does, if being in love makes you all at once the very worst and the very best you’ve ever been.  He drives as fast as he can and sings as loud as his voice can sing, but it’s all because there’s no other choice, it’s either yell or sing, not when everything Castiel does screams  _love me, love me, love m_ e, until it’s all Dean can hear; thoughts of Castiel turning his head to look at him with that steady look, _love me,_  Castiel bumping his shoulder against Dean’s as he walks past -  _love me, love me_ , Castiel trying to catch his eye, wanting Dean to notice him -  _love me, love me, love me._

He sits for a while on the side of the road and thinks about being brave. About how being in love ought to make him be the bravest he’s ever been.  About Donna Lewis.  About the songs on the playlist titled  _for him_.

He finds the pad of yellow paper and writes down the names of all the songs he can’t stop singing.

He looks at it.

He turns around.

 —

He comes home and drags his duffel to his room and he finds Castiel in his bed, Dean’s mp3 player in hand, Dean’s headphones on his ears.  Asleep.  Cas is sleeping in his bed. Right where Dean thinks he belongs.  

And he sees for the first time how things really are between them.  

There’s a sock under his bed, and it isn’t his.  

He lets the duffel go and it hits the floor with a thud.  

He thinks Cas might be moving in with him. No. He thinks Cas might’ve moved in with him, and he just hadn’t noticed until now.  Because there’s a sock under his bed. There are shirts hanging in his closet, a dingy white button-down and a ragged pale blue shirt and a purple-and-white-striped collared shirt.  There are shirts hanging up in his closet and they aren’t his, never were, don’t fit him, don’t even look like anything he’d wear.  There are a pair of ratty sneakers on the floor. He knows who they belong to.  He doesn’t know quite what they’re doing, pressed up alongside six dress shirts and the garment bags for his suits, but he knows, with a certain finality, that they belong.  Right where they are.

His room’s been rearranged in his absence.  Someone’s been in here. Someone has sat at his desk, laid down on his bed.  Someone has carefully dragged a second nightstand and pushed it up against the left side of the bed.  Someone has put a lamp there, too.  Someone has rifled through his records.  Someone has used his pillow.  Someone has carefully remade his bed. He can tell.  The corners aren’t military crisp, there’s a wrinkle at the headboard.  Dean thinks he knows who that someone was.  He closes his eyes and thinks of Cas, wandering up and down the bunker’s halls, stirring up dust, pressing his fingers against doors and books and chairs and pillows. Touching everything, all the same things Dean has touched.  He thinks of Cas, filling up the space on his bed. He thinks of Cas, carefully peeling records out of their cases and examining them, his fingers leaving marks on the vinyl.  Cas has filled those spaces up, with dirty socks and dried flowers and the cheap paperback books he always asks Dean to buy for him at Wal-Mart and his wallet and keys cluttering up Dean’s bedside table.

Castiel has been taking liberties with Den’s room.  Dean loves him so for not even asking if he could.  For taking that for granted.

He sits on the edge of the bed and looks at the mp3 player in Cas’s hand.  He takes out the pad of paper and puts it on the nightstand on Cas’s side.  And he shakes Cas’s shoulder.

Cas opens his eyes.    


"I’ve got.   I’ve got something to tell you,” he says, and he sits there with his hands on his knees and his heart in his throat and a thousand shitty love songs in his head and-

nothing comes out, and he’s thinking, If only. If only I was just a little bit braver, he is the cowardly lion, he has a heart that’s busy overflowing with rainbows and kittens and love ballads and his mouth is open and there’s nothing he can say, nothing at all-

so instead he just takes Castiel’s face between his palms, so carefully, because this is it, this is the moment, and for one wild second he’s not afraid at all.  Mostly because of Castiel, who is juse barely awake and who is looking at him like, well, duh, like he’s perfectly aware they’ve been inching closer and closer to this moment for years now and now they’re here.  Cas listening to the playlist titled  _for him._  The music is still blasting through the headphones.  It seems to Dean that he knows this song.

Cas copies him and Dean pretends he doesn’t notice, how Cas’s eyes follow his movements, how Cas's hands mirror his hands, how Cas was listening to  _Don’t stop believing_  though Dean’s headphones.  He touches his thumb to the corner of Dean’s mouth.  Then Dean’s lips.  Dean has sung along to songs that go something like this.   “You wanted to kiss me,” he says.  “Just now.  Didn’t you?”

Dean can’t move.

He almost takes his hand back. Because. He could really hurt Castiel, he knows.  The wrong move, and Dean will break him.  The wrong move, and Dean will break his own heart.  If he was braver, he thinks suddenly, he would have just stayed away, if he was braver —

and Castiel leans that final inch forward and kisses Dean on the mouth.

Castiel is kissing him and he’s frowning as he’s doing so and this is every dream Dean’s had in the last three years all coming true at once and they are sliding together, their bodies curving into each other. They are touching each other’s faces, they are reaching out for each other like in every terrible love song in the world.  They are holding hands.  They are holding hands and they are smushing their fingers between their chests; Dean can feel the warmth of Castiel’s skin on the back of his hand.

It makes him feel brave.

He feels like his chest is expanding, like his heart has grown seven sizes larger, his heart is pressing so close to his rib cage that something is going to burst. He thinks he may be dying.  He thinks he is probably dying.

He thinks about Castiel’s head between his hands, his lashes dark on his cheek, his mouth falling open.  He thinks about dying like this, with Castiel’s hands on his face, Castiel looking into his eyes, and he decides, yup, he’s okay with it.  It’s great, it’s perfect; it’s fucking everything he wants.  To go out with someone looking into his eyes and saying his name. I love you, Dean is thinking, fiercely, I do, no one else loves you as much as me.  This is every stupid song he’s sung along to and more.  

 


End file.
